hotel fears
June 11th, 2008There are some things — irrational things — that really frighten me about hotels.
First, I fear there are bugs in my bed. Generally, after putting down my stuff into the room, the first thing I'll do is lift the sheets and look for bugs. I don't mean tiny, barely visible bugs. I mean real bugs: roaches, spiders, beetles, and the like. I don't usually go as far as to check under the fitted sheet… but I do sometimes.
I also have this fear that the office chair in the room is dirty. Dirty beyond belief. I imagine dirty, sweaty, unwashed men sitting their naked butts onto that very same chair and rubbing them all over it. This means that, more often than not, I place one of the hotel towels on the chair before sitting.
Which gets me to the towels themselves. Usually, I'm pretty trusting of these. But that doesn't stop me from shaking them out and examining them before using them on my naked body. I'm just checking for hairs, bugs, and other such things. I once opened a hand towel to find beard shaving remnants in it. I almost threw up.
Then there's the shower. Not the shower itself, but the water coming out of it. I have this fear that, because everyone is using the water at the same time, we'll end up taking water from the very bottom of the water supply and end up with something less than desirable. Every time I close, reopening them fills my body with a fear that, when I do, the water will no longer be running clear.
Finally, there are the holes and vents that generally plague the bathroom. I'm lucky because the hotel I'm in now has none of these. But in many hotels the air conditioning is suspended over the bathtub. There are vents and drainage pipes and the noise it makes when it is running. I have visons of who knows what crawling out from these holes and pipes, or the entire thing just crashing into the shower while I'm using it.
And then lots of little things too. Like the thought that the cleaning people will do something gross to my toothbrush. Or that the glasses in the room have not been washed if they don't look used. Or that I'll move a piece of furniture around and find something that will frighten me.
What's more interesting is that I have almost none of these fears in my own home. However, in my own home, many of the above things have actually happened. The water in my shower did run a dirty brown once; something in the pipe and only for a brief second. We had a giant, fuzzy spider in our bed once, and countless numbers of smaller spiders in our room. Wasps flew out of one of the vents in my dad's house once. But, in a hotel, only a few of these things have ever happened, and, even then rarely.
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